For the first two centuries of the history of British North America, one word best characterizes the status of the vast majority of immigrants-servitude. From the founding of] amestown until the Revolution, nearly three-fourths of all immigrants to the thirteen colonies arrived in some condition of unfreedom.(See tables 1 and 2.) These migrations of slaves, convicts, and servants played a critical role in the demographic, economic, social, and cultural development of the colonies. When they came (or were brought) in large numbers, these strangers often caused a sensation in colonial society. Yet at a time when servitude was considered" normal," few were concerned that their arrival in America meant a temporary or permanent loss of freedom for most of them. 1

On the eve of the Revolution, these new servant immigrants contributed to a complex world of the free and the unfree, occupying different conditions of liberty and bondage, some tied to masters for briefperiods, others viewed as criminal outcasts rightly condemned to forced labor, and many more branded by race and doomed to servitude for life, with no rights of their own. All were interwoven into what Gordon S. Wood has called a" hierarchy of ranks and degrees of dependency" that was simultaneously a pluralistic world ofpeoples from Europe, Africa, and the Americas.> Before 1776, for most arrivals, coming to America meant a curtailment